"Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.
I'm not backing off."
Hamer of my favorite people in history, she didn’t take no shit.
We all know the tragedy of his murder.
But we don't talk enough about how his mother fought back.
Mamie Till-Mobley is often reduced to a weeping woman, but the reality is she never let Mississippi hide what they did.
In 1955, the state tried to quickly bury 14-year-old Emmett in a sealed coffin to cover up the murder.
Mamie stopped them. She demanded the body be shipped back to Chicago.
Once back in Chicago, she contacted the media.
Knowing the white press would ignore her, she went straight to John H. Johnson at Jet Magazine. Then, she left the casket open and said:
"Let the world see what they did to my boy."
Over just four days, she had 100,000 people walk past that casket to see exactly what happened to her son.
Mamie made southern racism impossible to ignore.
In the antebellum South, the 4th of July was basically a whites-only holiday.
White folks celebrated their freedom with a drunken intensity, shooting off guns, and wrapping themselves in "liberty" while actively holding human beings in chains.
For free Black communities, participating in these celebrations was very dangerous. Any display of Black patriotism was viewed as a threat and met with instant violence. In Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Boston, white mobs wielding bricks routinely attacked free Black citizens who dared to celebrate America.
So, Black Americans pivoted. They refused to celebrate on the 4th.
Instead, they claimed July 5th to observe their freedom. They also celebrated on other dates, like January 1st (the banning of the transatlantic slave trade) and August 1st (the British abolition of slavery in the West Indies) as true Black Independence Days.
July 4th was observed as a day of protest, so much so that Nat Turner originally planned his 1831 rebellion on Independence Day, looking to strike when the enslavers were distracted and drunk. The only reason it didn't happen is because Turner fell ill, forcing him to delay the strike until August.
Black folks always understood the white hypocrisy of the holiday, and some were willing to expose it in blood.
(Note: I run Black history project and just wrote a article on what happened next, how Black folks actually took over the 4th of July during Reconstruction, and how white folks violently stole it back check out "The Lie of the Fourth" )
https://onemicblackhistorypodcast.substack.com/p/the-lie-of-the-fourth
Segregation wasn't dismantled by a politician or a protest. It was dismantled by one Black father's love for his daughter.
In 1951, Oliver Brown's 9 year old daughter, Linda, walked six blocks through a dangerous railroad switchyard every single morning just to catch a school bus to her segregated Black school.
Meanwhile, an all-white elementary school sat just seven blocks from their house.
But Oliver Brown refused to let his child be treated as a second-class citizen. He grabbed Linda and walked straight into the all-white school, and demanded to be enrolled.
The rejection sparked Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
But here is the twist, The Black school actually had excellent facilities and great teachers, so on paper, it met the legal standard of "separate but equal."
Because of this, the State couldn't just buy better textbooks or a new roof.
Oliver Brown's act forced the court to rule on segregation itself, concluding that separation is inherently unequal and dismantling public school segregation in the United States.
Happy Father's Day
Less than a decade after emancipation, Juneteenth had already grown into a massive celebration in Texas.
And the local white folks hated it.
By the late 1860s, white property owners and city officials in Houston started locking Black folks out of both public and private spaces.
The goal was to kill the holiday by denying them the space to celebrate it.
Of course, it completely backfired.
Four formerly enslaved men, Reverend Jack Yates, Richard Allen, Richard Brock, and Elias Dibble went straight to their community.
They pooled together pennies, nickels, and dimes from other freedmen.
By 1872, they had crowdfunded $800 about $20,000 today in cash. They purchased 10 acres of Houston real estate and named it "Emancipation Park."
By buying the land outright, they made sure the city could never stop them from celebrating Juneteenth.
And in the weird irony, the land was absorbed by the city making Emancipation Park the first public park in the entire state of Texas in 1916.
Mainstream history will tell you that General Gordon Granger stood on a Galveston balcony, read General Order No. 3, and enslavers immediately followed the law, peacefully freeing 250,000 captive black folks.
At the time, Texas was the last stronghold of slavery in the united states.
Enslavers had been hiding tens of thousands of enslaved Black people from the Proclamation for nearly two years, believing they were untouchable by the war.
Juneteenth didn't come from a peaceful announcement, it came through force.
When Granger landed, a massive percentage of his occupying force was made up of the United States Colored Troops (USCT).
Texas enslavers did not surrender because they heard a speech.
They surrendered because the government sent an occupying army. Granger just gave the order, but it was thousands of Black Union soldiers standing in Galveston that forced them to actually comply.
Today is Tupac Shakur's 55th birthday.
Just one month before he was born his pregnant mother, Afeni Shakurwas facing over 300 years in prison.
In April 1969, the feds arrested Afeni as part of the "Panther 21," charging 21 Black Panthers with 150 counts of conspiracy based on police informant’s claims of a massive bombing plot.
The 22-year-old Afeni decided to defended herself
She personally cross-examined Ralph White, an undercover cop, forcing him to admit on the stand that he supplied the illegal weapons and pushed the violent rhetoric.
She successfully proved the entire conspiracy was a government plot.
The 8-month trial was the longest, most expensive political trial in NY history. And the jury deliberated for less than 45 minutes before acquitting her on May 12, 1971.
On June 16, Tupac was born.
